Kick in the ass

Yes. I used PS Dark Arts on Myself - 012812

"It's great to have a passion, but you must also have a work ethic around it." Unknown*

For the past month or so I received multiple subtle and explicit messages to get my shit together.  Most of these messages concern my art.  All of them are basically saying, "Karl, You take pretty good photos.  You have an eye for capturing people in your photos.  Good boy.  Now you really need to move on to the next level.  You need to do it better and you need to get it done.  Not only done, but done right."

I  hired a graphic/web designer/artist to help me build a commercial website.  She designed  a new logo for me late last year.  I was impressed by it and looked at her portfolio of commercial websites she designed and was very impressed.  I showed her my half-ass, stagnant website and she gently tore it apart in a critique.  I knew then I had hired the right partner to help build the new one.  A month later, and many hours of writing text, selecting key photos, and many other tasks concerning SEO, keywords, aspect ratios, and categorizations, it is almost ready to go public.  I will co-premier it here and Facebook when it is ready to go.  I will also share her name and website in that post.

That experience taught me a valuable lesson.  If I am going to spend a good chunk of money and get a strong commercial site going, I had better go all in or pack up.  You can't go into business half way.  All in or fold.   Balls deep.  Shit or get off the pot.  Ok.  Enough metaphors for that.

While on Christmas break I saw a great a video clip of a George Carlin tribute with Louie C.K.  Louie C.K. is a comic genius and speaks so many truths for me.  In this tribute he shares the influence of Carlin on his career.  The key lesson is to keep reinventing his work and push his comedy further and further and get to what is raw, core, and never stop exploring.  Go deeper.   The gold starts at 4:55.



It is too easy to keep producing the same images the same way and getting the same responses.  I keep creating the same stuff, just with different flavors.  I keep getting the same results, and not going too far both in my art and in the success of my art.

The golden nugget from this video made me realize that I get the best feedback from my stuff that pushes me in new directions, new materials, new concepts, new people, new methods, and new feelings.  It is time to let some things go that are finished and run their course with me.  It feels like being given a new wild world to go out and explore!!!

So, if the first lesson was to go all in or go home and the second lesson was to keep reinventing and pushing myself harder, deeper, and into new areas, the third one was a hard criticism on what I have done.  It made me first question what type of photographer/artist I am in the sense of the quality of my work and then kicked me in the ass to do something about it.

I sent out a few proof portrait images.  The subject liked a few and then did something shocking, but also taught me a lesson.  The subject edited  one of my photos and sent it back with the list of edits.  Holy fuck.  Nobody has edited my photos before, especially without telling me first.

At first I was pissed.  How dare somebody touch my work like that!  I went for a walk around the neighborhood and came back and decided to look at the edits and compare them to the original I had sent out.  In came the head kick of humility and the lesson - Karl, your digital photo editing skills are kind of rudimentary and basic.  Karl, you do some digital photo editing really well, but if you are going to do this seriously, you really have to get better at it.

I use Adobe Lightroom for my photo workflow, everything from downloading and storage, through editing and refining, to creating a print or digital output.  It has many great tools that are similar to what can be found in the traditional darkroom.  It greatly complimented my darkroom knowledge and helped me make the transition from film to digital.   All along I denied the value of Photoshop.  I felt it was too complicated to learn.  It made my art a technical exercise, not a passion of the soul.  I would get lost in all the layers and gadgets and my art would lose its soul.  All of these were excuses, not reasons.

I am in the middle of an intensive Photoshop course now and am finally beginning to understand that its a wondrous tool box that can liberate so many of the limitations that straight photography places on me.  I am quickly realizing that I am not making the best art I can and honoring my subjects by my reticence to learning this important (and let's face it, industry) tool.   It is sort of like learning magic.

I've learned many new things that remind me of the Harry Potter universe.  Magic has both its good and bad arts.  In the books, all Hogwarts students had to learn the Magic of the Dark Arts.  For some it became their primary tool for power, for others it became a last-use weapon or a knowledge on how to defend ones self from it.

I think this is true of Photoshop as well.  There are so many ways to manipulate photos within that program.  There is the subtle stuff like correcting for perspective, saturating or de-saturating colors, reducing wrinkles, getting rid of pimples, etc.  There is the heavy stuff like distorting the body to look thinner, taller, whiter, darker, and closer to an ideal of what someone should like vs. what they truly look like.  All of these tools are available for the photographer to change the photograph from simple edits to a work of fiction.  These are some potentially dark arts that I need to learn and master.  How I use my knowledge and mastery of the dark arts will determine whether my intent was good or not.

Below is a video about the dangers of Photoshop.



I haven't written a blog post in the past few weeks due to all the work I am pushing into my art while still working my paying job and trying to maintain a life.  I am not getting any younger.  I know I have many more years behind me than ahead of me.  I need to get my art done before I die and I need to get off my lazy ass and do it.  I also have to do it better or why do it all?

*I hate it when I hear a great quote and can't find who said it.  Google can only do so much I guess.  I know it was an author. 

I loved pushing your buttons.

I was born at an interesting time, but aren't we all?  My mom sent me into the world a few months before Neil Armstrong did his "giant leap."  I became self aware in the mid seventies and came of age in the eighties.  During that time, especially 1975 to around 1983 I became fascinated with buttons (the pushing type, not the holding your shirt closed type) for they represented technology and the manifestation of my imagination.

I forgot about this obsession until a few nights ago when I was using my iPhone.  After entering terms for a Google search in it, I realized its touchscreen did not have the satisfaction of feeling the physical responsive reply of a button actually being depressed or feeling the click.  That night I couldn't sleep because a flood of button memories came rushing in and I had to think about why the actual act of pushing buttons used to be my heart crying out for technology (and all its possibilities) that did not exist yet in my personal life.  I also realized just how few buttons existed in my life back then.  They mainly turned on or off things or made things manually open, close or shift.

Computers were just starting to be used in major systems, such as space flight when I was born.  By the early nineties, our cars had computers much more powerful than those that were on the Apollo spaceships.  At the same time as the early Apollo missions, the television show Star Trek (1966-1969) accentuated the major role of a central computer that regulated the ship, kept a huge database of information, was used for navigation, medical diagnosis, making food, and a multitude of other applications. 

I remember the first time I watched Star Trek I was amazed by all the buttons.  They did so many things.  Sulu could fire the phasers, Scotty could maintain the engines, Dr. McCoy could diagnosis patients by twisting a dial, moving slider and pushing a button.  After seeing that I wanted to push every button around, especially if it made something happen using electricity.

During the Christmas break of 1975, we moved into a new home in Billings, Montana and I soon found every new-to-me  button in the house.  The doorbell gave immediate satisfaction but became boring after a few repetitive pushes.   The two buttons on the stove vent hood turned on the fan or the light.  I liked those, one was red and the other was black.  We had a new box fan that used push buttons to select the speeds. The only other buttons around my life were the ones on the car's AM radio that changed the stations.  I would sometimes sit in the car in our driveway and push the buttons to watch the needle bounce around the radio dial.  In my mind I was flying a space ship though and these buttons were controlling everything important.

My obsession with controlling technology and pushing buttons went crazy in June 1977.  My mom took me to see Star Wars.  Along with all the aspects of it that an 8 year old boy could become obsessed with (my first crush was for Princess Leia), I loved all the damn buttons.  The spaceships and fighters had them, the Death Star was full of buttons that could operate trash compactors or destroy planets.  Even Darth Vader had them on his chest which kept him alive.  My favorite button though was the one and only button on the light saber.  I truly understood Obi Wan Kenobi's words of wisdom about this powerful weapon as he gave  Luke Skywalker his father's light saber.  This simple elegant weapon only needed one button to do the bidding of the user.

Obi-Wan: "I have something here for you. Your father wanted you to have this when you were old enough, but your uncle wouldn't allow it. He feared you might follow old Obi-Wan on some damned-fool idealistic crusade like your father did."
Luke: "What is it?"
Obi-Wan: "Your father's lightsaber. This is the weapon of a Jedi Knight. Not as clumsy or as random as a blaster. An elegant weapon... for a more civilized age."

God, I wanted a light saber.  

Robot Chicken Star Wars 3 - Clip 2 from Revolver Entertainment on Vimeo.

Around that time more buttons began appearing at home.  I can remember going to the store with my dad to buy our first calculator and distinctly recall its $80 price tag.  It had red LED numbers and could only perform addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, and nothing else.  It was magic to me.  It was our first computer.  It was TECHNOLOGY.

My mom was so excited for it.  She took care of the family checkbook and finances and always did the math on scratch paper.  This technology saved her hours of work over the course of a year.   On the other hand, I grew bored of its mathematical uses and soon used it as part of a cardboard spaceship cockpit which had many cardboard buttons, but the calculator became the ships computer.  I remember how stiff the buttons were and could sense the click from it both through auditory and tactical feedback. 

After that we got a stereo record player with more buttons, followed by a Kleenex box shaped tape recorder.  More buttons that actually did things were entering my life.  With all of this I was not satiated, my friends had microwave ovens and push button phones that I coveted.  Each time I got to push one of these buttons and tactically feel a response back and and an action as a response, I felt the power of technologies changing our lives.

In 1980 I got my first handheld electronic game, football.  After that I started to slowly lose my fascination with buttons.  Two major things came into my life about then that made me put my button fetish away.

The first were the early Radio Shack computers we got at school.  They started to represent technology because they could actually do the things that I imagined and dreamed of during my playtime with the old buttons around me.  I no longer had to pretend a calculator controlled my space ship.  I could use a real computer to do computer things.  Maybe part of this change also came from entering my adolescence and the fading away of imagination and play and the beginning of early adulthood.  Play was for kids.  Computers were for real.

This growing older also brought the second thing to change me, puberty.  Playing with toys, no matter how cool, took a distant backseat to the primal and novel feelings and urges that started pushing through my body and taking no prisoners.  I regressed from the development of technology in a way and started to grow into my primal sexual male self. 

Since those early computer days, these machines became part of my daily life  and were tools more than imaginative play escapes (until the internet came along, but that is a different story).   I used a typewriter when I entered college to write my papers.  I had a 280 PC by the end of that degree to print out my papers.  That computer was a tool and not much more.

The touch screen has taken over in so many electronics in the past decade.  The iPhone, iPad, and even the automated checkout counter at my local grocery store use touchscreens.  I love the speed and simplicity of these machines and the elastic capabilities that can completely change the use of the device by simply opening a different screen and using something new.  While I use these devices everyday, I am starting to miss those simple, early technological devices that had tactile physical responses from being pressed.  I miss the simplicity of one button controlling one thing.  Maybe that is one reason I love my Nikon dSLR over my iPhone and point and shoot digital cameras.  I push the shutter release and can feel it sink into the camera body and then both feel and hear the shutter release and reset allowing the light from the image to be recorded.  One motion, one action, one function. To paraphrase Obi Wan - An elegant technology... for a more civilized age."
 

Empire State (Building) of Mind

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I never got to see the twin towers before they came down.  I wonder if I would have been overwhelmed looking up at them.   They seemed so skinny and slight.  Since seeing the Empire State Building from a distance for the first time in 2009 and finally getting to touch it in 2010, I've grown attached to it.

It is a beautiful building.  It is tall, solid, and towers over that part of Manhattan.  It makes me feel small, inconsequential, and forgotten, but protected.  It stands guard over everyone, not recognizing the individual, but the looking over the mass of humanity that built it.

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Last year a few of us on the group trip had dinner in it before taking the multiple elevators up to the observation deck on a warm summer night.  I was scared to death to be up there, but soon the companionship of my friends and all the other viewers calmed.

I've been through a lot of emotionally powerful moments since that June night in 2010.  They included my heart, my art, my life, my health, my path, and my future.  That building continues to stand and doesn't know I am connected to it, but I know I am connected to it.

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I can't explain this connection to that building, it touches many areas, but I know when I see it I feel all the glory, goodness, pain, illness, love, creativity, angst, joy that I've swam through since then.   While I lived my life, that building stood silently watching over the city.

I had to touch the building when I visited New York last month.  I felt the buzzing energy in it and all of the year  since rushed through me and I jerked my hand away.  I looked up at it and knew I couldn't go to the top of it again that day.   I was afraid what would happen to me if I did.  Instead I looked at it from my hotel window that night, sighed, and closed my eyes.   I love that building.

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